Enhancement of system performance continues to be an important aspect in designing and configuring processing environments. One way to improve system performance is to improve memory access.
Currently, there exist mechanisms to perform memory address translations and to maintain those translated addresses in a buffer for easy access. The buffer is checked, in response to a memory access request, to determine if an address specified in the request is in the buffer. If it is in the buffer, the address is retrieved from the buffer and used to perform the memory access. This avoids re-translation of the address.
By maintaining the translated addresses in the buffer, economies of time are realized. However, although time is saved by maintaining those translations, other tests may still need to be performed for the page of memory specified in the memory access request. Thus, the memory page may not be readily accessible.